Mother Nature spared little expense in giving San Francisco a unique environment. Fog, earthquakes and fairly consistent temperature are part of it, but so are the many hills. Sometimes walking a block means climbing a miniature K2.

Of the 83,991 reported incidents to the SFPD in 2013, they selected 15,000 from Jan. 1 to Feb. 25 using DataSF, a repository of city data open to the public. Incidents ranging from car theft to drunkenness were tagged with latitude and longitude information. With that data in hand, the pair used the Google Elevation API to figure out the elevation of specific crime spots in the city.

The results indicate that if you want to steer clear of a crime, best head for the hills.

There are a lot of ways to pick the map apart and, as usual, correlation does not equal causation. Obviously median income of a neighborhood likely factors in — higher elevations tend to have higher property values and perhaps fewer bad guys roaming the streets. And hilly areas are typically less dense. With fewer people, there will be fewer opportunities for a crime in the first place. A per capita view of the map might tell a better story. Not to mention the fact that public transportation and the major roadways found on flatter ground no doubt play some part.

A portion of the code used to render the above map on GitHub. (Screengrab)

“We obviously only scratched the surface of this data,” Wintrob says. “But we received lots of good feedback and look forward to exploring further.”

And that’s actually what’s great about projects like this. Yes, it’s incomplete and subject to being torn apart by sociologists and statisticians. But it’s also an attempt by members of the public to make sense of publicly available information in a useful way. A decade ago that was the province of the academic community. Now two technically aware people can do this sort of thing over a lunch break. With more and more amateur analytic software popping up, the less technically savvy will be able to do the same thing soon.

Not to mention, Wintrob and Reinhardt posted their code to GitHub, one of the biggest repositories of open software and developer collaboration, allowing anyone to change it or pick it apart. “Everything is open for others to contribute and comment,” Wintrob notes.

Skeptics point out that given the level of civic apathy, most people won’t ever care, and they may be right. But as long as more people have access — and know that they have access — then there will be more people answering interesting questions and reaching conclusions without the push of the government, academia or private enterprise.

Then it’s on folks to implement actual solutions — perhaps the hardest part.